Surveys have revealed the reasons of the non-adoption of ICTs by the SMEs. A quick catalogue reveals these points: 

1. The need to reach a critical mass; 
2. Inadequacy of instruments and costs; 
3. Lack of information about the possibilities and availability of these instruments; 
4. Difficulty in training; 
5. To calculate exactly the costs of substitution and then to know how make use of the volume of information thus available; 
6. Under an exogenous point of view, the extremely rapid change in knowledge and technology and of the economical and institutional environment. 

        2) The second point very often does not exist, since a connection to the Net it is not expensive. Most of the time the software has already been installed in the computers of the firm, and firms are very often is unaware that the fall in the price of hardware makes the buying or the upgrading of computers reasonably cheap. It should not be forgotten that very often on the Net is possible to find a lot of software shareware with lower prices compared to the more famous brands, and very often they the same performances. 

        3) The lack of information is, as I have already written, the main problem, and it will hardly be solved on the short run. 

        4) The difficulty of training is not always true, since the use of the net by the employees is extremely easy and user-friendly, and the responsibility of the informative sector of the firm is very often composed by a single person, who usually is personally interested in these topics (e.g. informative systems, etc.); in this way it is nor particularly difficult, nor necessarily expensive train the employees. 

        5) Regarding the analysis of costs/benefits of access to the Net, it is obvious that SME have to ask consultants or service companies, because such analysis are not easy. There are more and more service agencies and societies developing who can help firms with the processing, upgrading and training of their informative systems, are able to evaluate whether a connection to the Net is necessary or not. 

       6) The last point is among the most difficult. It is possible to solve it if the firms trust these new agencies and societies, which are informed about the changes in the institutional and technological environment. We have seen that enterprises prefer to invest in well-known and tried, rather than the latest or the most innovative technologies, and thus some of them, depending on their sector, will not be interested in the latest browser version or in the most recent utility of an Intranet.